11 October 2011 1:56 PM

The Archbishop of Canterbury displays a distressing innocence on this foolish, pointless visit

What are we to make of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s presenting himself at the court of tyrant Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe?

He is allegedly there to protest about the treatment of Christians by the Mugabe regime. The first question to be asked is, ‘Why did Dr Williams address 15,000 Christians in a sports stadium?’

The answer we are given is that a renegade Mugabe-supporting cleric has ousted the authentic bishop from the cathedral and so the real Christians are having to worship elsewhere.

Has Dr Williams never read the Gospel of St Matthew where it says, ‘And Jesus went into the temple of God and cast out all them…and said unto them, “My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves”.’

The cathedral in Harare is part of the Anglican Communion, of which Dr Williams is Head. He should have followed Jesus’ example, stridden into that cathedral in full Archiepiscopal attire and commanded the renegade cleric and his lackeys to get out.

But then those louts might have murdered the good Dr Williams. So what? As they were stabbing him, he could at least have fallen to his knees rejoicing in his martyrdom and repeating the words of the eighty-six year old Bishop Polycarp who was given the choice in AD 166 to deny his Christianity or be burned at the stake.

Polycarp replied, ‘I have served my Lord these eighty-six years and he has never forsaken me. Why should I now forsake him?’

Polycarp was duly burnt. But then there were men of faith in those days.

The Archbishop of Canterbury constantly displays a distressing innocence when it comes to involving himself in political matters, and often the one half of his ‘mind’ does not seem to comprehend what the other half is doing: as when he described himself as ‘a bearded leftie’ – but one who would like to see some aspects of Sharia law in Britain. This is a bit like some comely country yokel girl announcing that she wishes to remain a virgin for life, and yet beget seven children.

There is a longer story here and it does not reflect well on the Church of England. When the Tory government of 1979, under the foreign secretary Lord Carrington, handed over Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, to the evil Mugabe, referring to the tyrant as ‘an honourable man who will bring democracy to his nation,’ the Church of England hierarchy backed Carrington to the hilt.

We go back further still. In the late 1960s when Prime Minister Harold Wilson was in difficult consultation with the then leader of Southern Rhodesia, Ian Smith, the gormless Archbishop of Canterbury of the day, Michael Ramsey – you see, there seems to be an almost apostolic succession of gormlessness among Archbishops of Canterbury – wrote to Wilson saying that if the British authorities wished to use force against Smith’s government, then the Church of England would not stand in the way.

We go back even further. Before white colonialism in Rhodesia, the whole vast area was plagued by tribal warfare and atrocities on the grand scale. The short-lived era of white supremacy was not perfect – no human government ever is – but it was infinitely better than what had gone before. Smith’s government was subtly increasing black involvement in the processes of government and the legislature.

Democratic institutions were established. Southern Rhodesia was a land so fertile and well-farmed it could have fed all Africa.

Then in 1979 Lord Carrington, with the enthusiastic support of the Church of England, delivered this demi-paradise into the hands of the megalomaniac, genocidal Robert Mugabe.

Agriculturally - because Mugabe has confiscated all the working farms - the place is now a desert where the people are starving. Moreover, Mugabe has not only terrorized white farmers and approved the wholesale rape of their wives and daughters; he has murdered 300,000 black Zimbabweans.

To such a man, Dr Williams delivers the oxygen of publicity by his foolish and pointless visit. Williams constantly reminds me of a line by the great 20thC poet C.H. Sisson, ‘In the presence of folly, I am not sanctified, but angry.’